Monday, July 15, 2013

All Day Long

What to do all day long? If my life were a book, right now we’d be at one of those little excerpts at the beginning of a new chapter. A stanza from a Langston Hughes poem, or an esoteric quote. I’ve thought a lot—and have had to answer a lot of questions about—how I’m spending my time in Oakland before I relocate to Boston. Maybe I should take the advice of a character from the book I just started reading this morning:

"If I were you, I'd wake up every day at dawn to see the sun come up. Then I'd go back to bed. I'd screw a different woman every night and mean it when I told her I loved her. I'd read a mystery and stop halfway through so I'd have something to wonder about. I'd see how many grapes I could fit in my mouth. I'd drive a hundred miles an hour. I'd stay sober in the morning, drunk in the afternoon, high at night. I'd have Chinese food and tacos for dinner, spaghetti for breakfast and blueberry pie for lunch. Then I'd have anything I wanted in between, 'cause son"—here he took another hit, then looked at the ground, shaking his head—"pretty much all your choices are about to go away."

(p. 15)

He Died All Day Long

By Jon Wells

Unlike the other character who was actually on the receiving end of this advice, I am not headed to fight in the Vietnam War in nine days. It's not that serious. But I do feel like, for the next month, my "free time" is about as free as it's gonna be for a cool bit. I've gotten most of the admin tasks knocked out—apartment locked down, health insurance extended for a month, first tuition payment made today, etc. Every day's a little different, but they've been good. Full of books and full of family.